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Little sister is watching

Most of us hear of the Little Sisters of the Poor only in joking reference to the weakness of opponents scheduled by major-college athletic teams: "We couldn't run the ball against the Little Sisters of the Poor."

The real Little Sisters of the Poor, an order of Roman Catholic nuns, don't field a football team, so far as we know. But they make big plans. Scary ones.

The Sisters are out to destroy religious freedom in America, to establish their own religion as the nation's. Exactly what the country's founders intended to prevent.

The Sisters have filed suit in federal court, alleging that they are above secular law. Their suit may go all the way up to the Supreme Court, where the sisters would stand a very good chance of winning. Six of the nine Supreme Court justices are Catholic. The Court has already made an unprecedented ruling that corporations have free speech. If the Constitution can be so distorted to benefit corporations, why not special favors for Catholics?

The Sisters are challenging a provision of the federal Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare. The law requires that health-care plans cover birth control. It does not require that the Sisters practice birth control, nor any employee of the institutions operated by the Sisters, nor that birth control for employees be approved by the Sisters. The law merely requires that birth-control coverage be available to employees who want it. But even this is too much for the Sisters. The rights of ordinary workers are inferior to those of nuns, they argue, and what is impermissible for nuns must be impermissible for nuns' employees too, regardless of whether the employees are Catholic or not.

The Sisters have found powerful Protestant allies. Several Protestant-owned corporations, strengthened by the Supreme Court's earlier decision in their favor, have filed suits similar to the Sisters', challenging the requirement that birth control be included in their health-care plans. Hobby Lobby, owned by fundamentalist Baptists, is among the best-known of these pious and chatty corporations. It places full-page ads in newspapers across the country attacking church-state separation and insisting that the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation. David Green, Hobby Lobby's founder, believes his right to force his faith on others supersedes government mandates. Workers are free to believe as their boss tells them, in other words. Presumably a boss who was a Christian Scientist could prohibit his employees from participating in any health-care plan. Another might pass out poisonous snakes to his employees. Please Sisters, let the First Amendment alone.

A rediscovered violin concerto brings an oft-forgotten composer into the limelight.

My colleagues John Ray and Jesse Bacon and I estimate, in the first analysis of its kind for the 2018 election season, that the president's waning popularity isn't limited to coastal cities and states. The erosion of his electoral coalition has spread to The Natural State, extending far beyond the college towns and urban centers that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. From El Dorado to Sherwood, Fayetteville to Hot Springs, the president's approval rating is waning.

Despite fierce protests from disabled people, the U.S. House voted today, mostly on party lines, to make it harder to sue businesses for violating the Americans with Disabilities Act. Of course Arkansas congressmen were on the wrong side.

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We're sad to report that Doug Smith has decided to retire. Though he's been listed as an associate editor on our masthead for the last 22 years, he has in fact been the conscience of the Arkansas Times. He has written all but a handful of our unsigned editorials since we introduced an opinion page in 1992.

Last week, Attorney General Dustin McDaniel became the first elected statewide official to express support for same-sex marriage. His announcement came days before Circuit Judge Chris Piazza is expected to rule on a challenge to the state's constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. Soon after, a federal challenge of the law is expected to move forward. McDaniel has pledged to "zealously" defend the Arkansas Constitution but said he wanted the public to know where he stood.

Remarking as we were on the dreariness of this year's election campaigns, we failed to pay sufficient tribute to the NRA, one of the most unsavory and, in its predictability, dullest of the biennial participants in the passing political parade.

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My colleagues John Ray and Jesse Bacon and I estimate, in the first analysis of its kind for the 2018 election season, that the president's waning popularity isn't limited to coastal cities and states. The erosion of his electoral coalition has spread to The Natural State, extending far beyond the college towns and urban centers that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. From El Dorado to Sherwood, Fayetteville to Hot Springs, the president's approval rating is waning.